Unleash Your Inner Explorer With This Awesome Pocket Lab
A new sensor device, developed by a Stanford Ph.D. student, promises to change the way students, educators, and science enthusiasts explore the world — from elementary school to the Ph.D. lab and beyond.
PocketLab is a wireless, durable, and easy-to-use sensor that enables you to gather information from the world. Appropriately branded the “Swiss Army knife of science,” the tiny device you can literally carry in your pocket packs an accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, barometer, and thermometer, all of which seamlessly and instantaneously feed your tablet or smartphone with measurement data. You can start learning about magnetic fields, pressure, or acceleration in seconds.
Clifton Roozeboom, co-founder and CEO of PocketLab, and a six-year Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering at Stanford says,
“What we saw in existing technology, was that it’s really expensive, or hard to use, and we wanted to provide something that is easy to use and is fun to go out in the world and explore with. [With PocketLab] you can start to experience the way science is really done.”
Now, whenever you or your kids have questions like, “How high did we hike today?” or “What happens when I collide the matchbox cars?” or “How fast am I going on my skateboard?” or “What’s the temperature in the ice box, and how quickly is it changing?” you can actually give precise answers. Just stick PocketLab in the cooler, tape it to a skateboard, or a car, or yourself. The collected data is displayed in real time and is easily integrated with Excel and Google Docs. In addition, PocketLab facilitates users to share the results of their experiments, search other people’s experiments, curate the data, and make it available to inspire others.
The device has already been thoroughly tested (“We have strapped the PocketLab onto bottle rockets, dropped it from the top of building, and, scariest of all, left it alone with some candy in a classroom of 5-year-olds”) and is now ready for manufacturing, to be sold for the affordable $129.
PocketLab is also currently fundraising on Kickstarter.
Photos: PocketLab
